Storchenbruecke

Deployment Storchenbruecke, Winterthur, Switzerland

A long term deployment has been set up to demonstrate the capabilities and the ease of use of wireless monitoring systems in the field of civil engineering. In this application tensile forces of cable stays of a cable stayed bridge are monitored by tracking natural frequencies of cable vibrations.

Since energy resources are limited and data communication is an energy consuming task, the amount of transmitted data has to be kept small in order to extend system lifetime. In this case, the acceleration time series is processed on the node and reduced to one frequency value which has to be transmitted over the air.

The concept of data reduction by means of processing raw data on the sensor node level is demonstrated in the deployment at the Stork Bridge in Winterthur. The installation is running since 2006 and is one of the first long-term wireless monitoring applications worldwide.